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By the time he started work on ''A Treatise of Human Nature'' at the age of 23, Hume had become skeptical of religious belief. [[CiteRef:: Morris and Brown (2016)]] The term '''atheism''' was coined by Sir John Cheke almost two hundred years earlier in 1540, to refer to a lack of belief in divine providence. The term assumed its modern meaning of disbelief in the existence of God, as divine non-existence emerged as a disquieting possibility in the seventeenth century. [[CiteRef:: Hyman (2007)]] Although Descartes' rationalism had a proof of God's existence at its foundation, it was nonetheless a challenge to the theological methodology established by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). This methodology stressed the limitations of human reason, and the necessity of reliance on divine revelation and the text of the Bible. Descartes instead stressed the human capacity to know God and nature through reason alone. Descartes' rationalist argument for God's existence and guarantorship of the certainty of scientific knowledge was soon rejected as circular. [[CiteRef:: Hyman (2007)]][[CiteRef::Cottingham (1992)]] It was supplanted by Newton's experimental philosophy and Locke's empiricism, both of which stressed experience and observation as sources of the limited knowledge to which humans could aspire. It eschewed metaphysics and speculative hypotheses. [[CiteRef::Rogers (1982)]] Though they held non-standard beliefs, both Newton and Locke were devoutly religious. Like many natural philosophers associated with the Royal Society, they rejected traditional rationalist proofs of God's existence and instead espoused the '''design argument''', supposing that the experimental method could demonstrate that the universe was an artifact crafted by a cosmic Designer. Hume's ''Dialogues on Natural Theology'' (1779) was a response to such hopes, and was to raise devastating objections to them. Unlike Locke, Hume saw that empiricism must place God's existence among those speculative questions to be eschewed. [[CiteRef::Hyman (2007)]] Doubts about God's existence also arose among French intellectuals in the mid-eighteenth century, with the first to openly proclaim himself an atheist being Denis Diderot (1713-1784). [[CiteRef:: Hyman (2007)]][[CiteRef::Bristow (2017)]]
|Major Contributions==== Hume and moral philosophy ===
Hume's main philosophical contributions were made via several works. The first was ''A Treatise of Human Nature'' published in three volumes in 1739 and 1740, when Hume was 29 years old. ''Enquiries concerning Human Understanding'', published in 1748, ''concerning the Principles of Morals'' published in 1751, and ''Dialogs concerning Natural Religion'' published posthumously in 1779, three years after his death. [[CiteRef::Morris and Brown (2016)]][[CiteRef:: Norton (2009)]] His basic philosophical project is indicated by the subtitle of the ''Treatise''; 'an attempt to introduce the experimental method into moral subjects'. An admirer of the Newtonian experimental philosophy, Hume sought to extend it from natural philosophy into what was then called '''moral philosophy''', which he defines as the 'science of human nature'. Natural philosophers, he maintains, had cured themselves of their "passion for hypotheses and systems"
